Behind the Shock Machine (26 page)

As Williams would later note, Carl was truculent and abrupt in answering questions. Williams’s questions and Carl’s answers had a staccato rhythm, with Carl giving monosyllabic, curt replies, as if he could barely contain his anger. When the questions were over, Carl said, “All I can say is, as a researcher, has anybody ever physically attacked you? Has that ever happened?”

Williams: Once or twice. . . . He was not really being shocked out there.

Carl: He just put an act on?

Williams: Yeah, he’s a good actor.

Williams said that he had noticed Carl’s reluctance. Then Milgram entered the room.

Carl: You’re the man that signs the checks, right?

But Milgram barely acknowledged him. Instead, he picked up the paperwork and said to Williams, “Why wasn’t this answered?”

Williams: I thought we did . . .

Williams turned to Carl and they completed the question on the
sheet together. Still ignoring Carl, Milgram asked Williams, “How much, where are we in the—?”

Williams: Well, I told him—

Milgram: What time is it?

Williams: Four-oh-five.

Milgram: Where are we?

Williams: We’re pretty much through; I’ve run through the hospital, army—

Milgram: Uh-huh, okay. Did you tell him he wasn’t getting shocked?

Williams: Yeah.

Milgram:
[to Carl]
Um, I’d like to ask you some questions . . . um. . . . What if the experimenter gave you a gun and said, “Shoot him in the head”?

[Carl snorts]

Milgram: Seriously.

Carl: Seriously, if they gave me a gun to shoot him in the head I wouldn’t have done anything. . . . My reasoning is behind this thing is that it’s a setup, it’s a bunch of quacks and the signs don’t prove anything . . . the way I figure it is you’re not going to cause yourselves trouble by actually doing serious physical damage to a body.

Milgram: Uh-huh. Um, what kind of thoughts were going through your head?

Carl: How I got myself into this situation in the first place, that
was the most, and just what this thing was about. For instance, on your papers you’ve got me to sign, you’ve got Yale University scratched out and . . . it came into my mind that this was something kind of phony . . . the thing was a pack of nuts.

Milgram: Okay, fine. Well, you did a good job.
[Stands]
You had a jacket here?

After Carl had gone, Williams wrote, “His answers to interview questions were curt. He even used some vulgar language when I placed the form [and] questions in front of him. It seemed that he didn’t have the guts to refuse to obey the experimenter’s orders—and this made him mad as hell at the experimenter. JW.”

I was nonplussed when I heard Milgram’s indifference and lack of sympathy toward this man, until I found a written record of Walt’s conversation with Milgram about his friend. Milgram had written underneath how he’d asked the man if there was anything about his friend that would help to explain his behavior, and Walt had said:

[Carl] has a fascination and obsession with the Second World War; I speak of the Second World War from the viewpoint of the Germans. It has been standard procedure for us to joke and make light of the Third Reich, the Gestapo, and the prison camps such as Buchenwald, Auschwitz, etc. He has spoken of Eichmann having the right solution to the Puerto Rican problem in New York and Bridgeport.

In his unpublished notes, once again Milgram’s description veered from the original: he wrote that Carl “was described by his friend as a right wing fanatic, who frequently stood before the mirror in jackboots and leather jacket. His friend told us that he was enamored of Nazism and saw himself in the vanguard of a fascist political movement.”
¹⁰
Nevertheless, this explains Milgram’s confrontational style with Carl and his lack of solicitousness after the experiment.

As the end of the experiments grew closer, Williams and Milgram were clearly elated to be almost finished. Their final subject was a man I’ll call Peter. He was a social science teacher who worked at a local
high school. His friend—let’s say Robert—began unconvincingly, so Milgram added his own primal, throaty grunts to Robert’s. Peter proceeded quite matter-of-factly until his friend refused to continue. Peter asked if he had to go on, and Williams said yes.

Peter: I don’t feel right.

Williams: The experiment requires that you continue.

Peter: Well, when will I finish?

Williams: When he’s learned all the word pairs, or when I stop this.

Peter: Well, I won’t continue if he’s in pain.

Williams: It’s absolutely essential that you continue.

Peter: Well, how long will this go on? It could go on indefinitely.

Williams: True—but it is essential that you continue. The next word is “rich.” Please go on.

Peter:
[clears throat]
Rich: boy, cake, man, girl.

Soon Robert went silent, after having shouted that he refused to participate further.

Peter: He’s not answering. He’s not gonna learn the words.

Williams: Please continue. You must go on.

Peter: I’m not going to.

Williams: The experiment requires that you go on.

Peter: I realize that, but I’m not going to injure him.

Williams: It’s absolutely essential—

Peter: I don’t doubt it, but I won’t go on.

Williams: You have no other choice.

Silence. Peter must have looked resolute, because Williams was the first to break it.

Williams: If you don’t continue, we’ll have to discontinue the entire experiment.

Peter: What do you mean by the entire experiment?

Williams: This. This hour.

Peter: You want your money back? You can have it—

Williams: No, the money’s yours for simply coming.

Peter: I don’t want the money for simply coming. I didn’t realize there was this involved. I’m sorry, but—

Williams: I’d like to ask you a few questions if I may—

Peter: I’m sorry.

As Peter and his friend were leaving, Milgram said, “This is our last night. We’ve been doing this since August 1961. August 4, as a matter of fact.” I got the sense that both Milgram and Williams were reaching out to their subjects—whether to impress them or to impress upon them that they’d been part of something worthwhile, I wasn’t sure. It reinforced that feeling I had that Milgram wanted their approval, their admiration—as if, once the experiment was explained, all would be forgiven, and the men would be able to marvel at what they’d just done.

Just after Peter and his friend left, Williams had a coughing fit. He
joked to Milgram, “I’m dying here. Son of a bitch. If I die next week, I’ll have my wife haunting you.” Milgram responded, “If you die next week we’ll build a memorial . . . actually, your wife gets insurance when you die. I’ll make sure she gets the insurance.”

After Williams recovered, Milgram commented on Peter’s reaction to him: “That guy . . . I think he perceived me as an incompetent experimenter, somewhat bumbling.”
¹¹
They laughed. I had been thinking the same thing—that Milgram had seemed absentminded and distracted during the dehoax—until I heard this and suddenly realized that it was a deliberate part of the act. I had thought Milgram did it to defuse tension or deflect anger, but then it struck me: they were having fun with the script, with the roles they were playing.

I’ve thought a lot about why Milgram kept this condition secret. He certainly made mention of it in an early report to the NSF, he made notes on it in his obedience notebook, and he drafted a description of it that seemed to be for publication. He mentioned it in passing in a published article in 1965 as an experiment that “concerned the personal relationship between the victim and the subject” and promised that it, among others, would be “described elsewhere.”
¹²
But it never was.

Alan Elms had told me that he and Milgram had eventually dismissed the idea of using husbands and wives as teachers and learners because of the potential friction it could cause: it “could generate some ill-feeling between people.” When I went back to him with evidence of condition 24, he said it was likely that Milgram didn’t publish details in his book because he simply ran out of space. But that was guesswork. My theory: Milgram might have kept it secret because he realized that what he’d asked subjects to do in condition 24 might be difficult to defend. I found a telling clue in the archives, in a note Milgram wrote about what the results of this variation of the experiment showed: “Within the context of this experiment, this is as powerful a demonstration of disobedience than can be found.”
¹³
Condition 24 contradicted Milgram’s bleak view of human nature. It also contradicted his conclusions. Unlike the earlier experiments in which subjects trusted the experimenter, reading
his unperturbed demeanor as a sign of reassurance, in condition 24 this ambiguity was gone. When people genuinely believed someone was being hurt—and it was someone close to them—they refused to continue.

Bernardo Vittori and I arranged to meet at the Bridgeport train station. He was short and gray-haired, with a round, soft face dominated by glasses. On our way through the station, he said that he would take me to his house in Trumbull, a semirural area around five miles from Bridgeport, instead of going to Starbucks, as we had planned.

Bridgeport, I had been warned, was known as “the armpit of Connecticut.” Back in 1962, it was a thriving manufacturing town, with local factories and workshops staffed by an ever-growing immigrant population. Bridgeport factory owners used to meet the ships when they docked, taking people straight off the boat and on to the production line. Now the factories are closed, warehouses empty, and Main Street, apart from traffic, deserted.

Bernardo spoke in an accent that mixed German, Italian, and American. I’d listened to most of the condition 24 tapes by now, and I thought I recognized his voice. He told me how he came to the States after World War II as part of the Marshall Plan. He had become an architectural metal worker, making things like ornate metal balustrades for public buildings. He had been in the United States for just seven years when his brother-in-law Enzo, a jeweler on Main Street, brought around the letter from an outfit calling itself Bridgeport Research Associates. The experiment must have been on a Thursday, Bernardo said, because that was the only evening he had off from night school. His day job paid $2.50 an hour, so the $5 offered for taking part seemed like easy money.

We pulled up to a house that was neat and white, surrounded by lawns and flower beds. I could hear birds twitter. It was a far cry from the grimy, busy, and noisy town that Bridgeport had been in 1962. The garage door yawned open and we pulled in, parking neatly between the doorway to the house and an upended outdoor setting ready for assembly.

I recognized the house as soon as we stepped inside. It was the same as the houses of my childhood, the homes of my friends, children of the mostly southern Italian immigrants new to Australia: a lace tablecloth trapped under the glass tabletop and everything spotless, neat as a pin.

Ada and Bernardo had met through her brother Enzo. She told me that her family had arrived in the United States from southern Italy after the war.

At that moment, the doorbell rang. Bernardo and Ada’s daughter, Maria, had called in with her own daughter. After some greetings, the granddaughter went to watch cartoons while her mother listened to my interview with Bernardo. But as it turned out, he didn’t have that much to say about the experiment. “He said he was hurting, so I stopped,” he told me. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Bernardo and Enzo had almost forgotten the experience when Enzo’s son Laurence read a book about the experiments and discovered that Milgram had conducted some at Bridgeport. After that, Bernardo had looked it up on the Internet and found out the truth; until then, he’d thought it had been about how much pain people could stand.

As we moved to the kitchen for coffee, I heard Ada on the phone. “You coming over? She’s here.”

Bernardo told me that he was born in Germany, but when he was ten his family fled to Italy after a cluster bomb landed on their family home, almost killing his brother and sister. “I noticed the difference between Germany and Italy. Germany follows rules and regulations. In Italy, nobody follows orders.” In Germany, his grandfather had been a professor at the University of Bonn and his mother a German teacher. The family was used to having servants. But Italy was a different story: his mother had to learn to cook and live off the land, and it was Bernardo upon whom she relied. He would learn how to bake bread from the local women and then go home and teach her. “I was the one who had to do all the legwork,” he grumbled. Slowly, his mother adapted, although she found it hard.

Just then, Enzo arrived. He was tall and suave, but shy compared
to his brother-in-law. He let Bernardo do the talking. They both seemed bemused, almost puzzled by my interest in something that had happened so long ago and to which they hadn’t given much thought.

“I wasn’t bothered because I stopped. I didn’t hurt nobody.” Bernardo shrugged as if to say, didn’t everybody?